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European Art

European artworks from the medieval to the early modern period comprise one of the Museum’s most substantial holdings, with particular strengths in medieval sculpture, early Italian Renaissance panel painting, and 17th-century Dutch and Italian painting. Significant gifts from collector Caroline R. Hill dramatically enhanced this area in the 1950s and 1960s including a pinnacle panel from Duccio’s iconic Maestàaltarpiece. The Museum’s collection also saw noteworthy growth under the visionary stewardship of Wendy Watson, the Museum’s curator from 1974 to 2015. Watson facilitated the acquisition of a number of remarkable European paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, such as a late French Gothic sculpture of the Virgin and Child; an exquisite Sienese cassone (wedding chest) depicting the death of Lucretia; an important Italian Renaissance altarpiece by Bartolomeo di Giovanni; a richly iconographic 17th-century Dutch vanitas painting; and a majestic Neoclassical landscape by French master Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, among other major gifts and purchases.

Events And Links

2009

The Art of Devotion

Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy

At heart a collaborative venture, the creation of early fifteenth-century panel paintings in Italy depended upon a tight network of connections between patrons, painters, woodworkers, and gilders. The product of these interactions was an object that served both as a focus for devotion, and as an...

At heart a collaborative venture, the creation of early fifteenth-century panel paintings in Italy depended upon a tight network of connections between patrons, painters, woodworkers, and gilders. The product of these interactions was an object that served both as a focus for devotion, and as an...

French painters have historically taken to landscape with a zeal unmatched by artists of any other nationality. Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting traces the history of artists’ engagement with nature from the late Renaissance, when landscape painting...